Woke or Christian? Perhaps the controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey says more about us than about Homer.

Some gifts are so magnificent that they compel us to wonder, as Laocoön did, what they contain. The Trojans pondered this too late when they found that gigantic horse abandoned before their walls. And something similar is happening, almost three thousand years later, with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey .

The film has transcended its status as a mere cinematic event, becoming a cultural phenomenon of extraordinary proportions. Its worldwide success has propelled it to surpass all of Universal’s historical records, reaching $1.677 billion as of September 12. Perhaps that’s why it’s all the more intriguing to ask which Homer we’ve introduced into our own personal Trojan horse.

Some have discovered within the horse the woke ideology : Western guilt, deconstruction of the hero, repentance, and renunciation of power. Others have found exactly the opposite: a surprising Christianization of Homer, an Odysseus who discovers sin, forgiveness, hospitality, love, and renunciation.

Who is right? Maybe both of them. Or maybe neither of them entirely.

These lines are not intended as film criticism. They arose from a discussion among friends sparked by these contradictory interpretations after seeing the film. Nor are we particularly interested in determining who has read more Homer or who saw the film first. The question is different: what happens when a civilization retells one of its foundational stories three thousand years later and decides to change its ending?

Because Nolan changes it. And the ending of a story is never a minor detail.

From restoration to atonement

The Odyssey is above all a nostos , a return. And perhaps that is why it has fascinated for centuries: he who returns to Ithaca—home—is no longer the same man who left it. He has known other worlds, other women, other peoples, other gods, dangers and temptations, only to finally discover the value of what he left behind. Every great journey ends up confronting us with our earliest loyalties. Life’s own journey very often returns us to our roots, to those early beliefs in which our parents and grandparents raised us and which we later discarded in our youth in pursuit of an illusory Troy.

The Homeric ending is unequivocally restorative. After the slaughter of the suitors, a new cycle of vengeance still threatens, but Zeus and Athena intervene and restore peace. Odysseus returns home, reclaims his place in Ithaca, and the shattered world is restored to order. Book XXIV concludes precisely with this reconciliation.

Nolan chooses a different path. His Odysseus doesn’t culminate the adventure by simply reassuming power. The experience of war, lies, and bloodshed leads him toward renunciation and a form of atonement.

And now we know that this transformation was entirely conscious. Nolan himself explained after the premiere that he left out part of the Homeric ending because he considered it too “macabre” and “misogynistic,” although he wanted to preserve what, in his opinion, it tells us about men and their way of waging war.

The statement is revealing. Nolan, of course, has every right to reinterpret Homer. Europe has been doing so for millennia. The problem isn’t artistic license, but pretending that such a modification is meaningless. In explaining his reasons, the director himself acknowledges something essential to this discussion: he has viewed Homer through the moral lens of our time and decided what could be preserved and what should be transformed.

Homer takes Odysseus from scattering to restoration. Nolan seems to take him from guilt to atonement.

This is not a minor plot twist. This is a shift in the moral center of the story.

Woke or Christian?

Here’s where the controversy begins:

One interpretation sees in the new Odysseus yet another episode in the West’s guilt-ridden revision. Our era has moved with surprising ease from the hagiography of its heroes to their demolition. Conquerors, discoverers, rulers, missionaries, soldiers, and founders are taken out of their time, toppled from their statues, and brought before a tribunal constituted with the moral sensibilities—or the sensibilities that some seek to make mandatory—of the 21st century.

From that perspective, the hero can no longer defeat his enemies, return and rule: he must feel guilty for his own victory.

There is some merit to that criticism. But reducing Nolan’s Odysseus to a woke hero because of it presents an obvious problem: before repenting, he kills the suitors, and he does so with a violence that hardly seems to herald the triumph of meekness.

The real contrast, therefore, is not between a strong Odysseus and a weak one. It is deeper: restoration or atonement.

And that’s where the opposing interpretation comes in. Several Christian critics have noted in the film a morality surprisingly close to Christianity: hospitality, a sense of guilt, compassion for the weak, horror of war, forgiveness, and renunciation of power.

Others have criticized Nolan precisely for having taken Homeric xenophobia too close to Christian morality.

The paradox is formidable: what some consider a deconstruction of the West could be read by others as the introduction in Homer of another of the essential roots of the West: Christianity .

Because the West is not only Greece and Rome, Achilles and Caesar, will, conquest and power.

It is also the Sermon on the Mount. It is the unsettling idea that the last may be first; that forgiveness may be greater than victory; that an eye for an eye is not the final word of justice; and that it is worthless to gain the whole world and yet lose your soul.

That’s why automatically identifying guilt and resignation with woke ideology is too easy.

But it’s not very logical to transform Odysseus into a Christian either. Christianizing Homer is also changing him.

Xenia , the sacred hospitality of the Greek world, is not yet the universal brotherhood of the Gospel. And the Homeric hero lives within a warrior morality far removed from Christ, though perhaps not so far from the ethos of the Crusades.

There is also another, even more important difference.

The gods of Homer exist for the Greeks.

These are not literary devices or psychological projections. Athena is not simply Odysseus’s conscience, Poseidon is not a projection of his traumas or paranoia, and Zeus is not a metaphor for fate. Humans inhabit a sacred cosmos in which divine powers intervene, punish, protect, and ultimately restore order.

Our era faces enormous difficulties in truly entering that world. And perhaps that is where the real Trojan horse is hidden.

When a religion becomes mythology

We say quite naturally that Homer speaks to us of “Greek mythology”.

But for the men who lived within that universe, it wasn’t mythology. It was religion.

The temples we photograph today were once sacred places. The statues we contemplate in museums were once the object of prayers. The gods we study as literary characters were once part of a civilization’s ultimate explanation of reality.

And here is a sign that should concern us:

When a civilization begins to call what was formerly its religion “mythology,” it is likely that it has lost the spirituality that gave it its backbone and reason for being.

That happened with the ancient world.

Isn’t this happening to us too?

Perhaps one day a visitor will tour our cathedrals as we tour the Parthenon today. They will admire the stained-glass windows, ask who that crucified man was who appears in key locations, and listen to the guide explain the ancient “Christian mythology” of Europeans. Perhaps our most splendid cities will end up being transformed into theme parks for these new tourists.

Civilizations do not disappear only when they are conquered or invaded.

They also begin to disappear when they cease to understand—and, eventually, to venerate—the beliefs upon which they were built and the symbols they themselves created.

For decades we have witnessed a systematic erosion of many of these symbols, due to the negligence of most and the perfidy of a few. The worrying thing is not only their disappearance, but also the complete lack of clarity regarding what beliefs, hopes, or conceptions of humanity are destined to take their place. A civilization can survive many defeats; what it rarely survives is nihilism. Whether it’s called suicide or assisted euthanasia, the outcome is the same.

What’s inside Nolan’s horse

That’s perhaps why we’ve framed the discussion about Nolan incorrectly. The question isn’t simply whether his Odyssey is woke or Christian.

The truly interesting question is why we need to turn Homer into one thing or the other .

The culture war has conditioned us to polarize ourselves ad nauseam and to immediately seek out friends and enemies. A cast member, a line of dialogue, or a plot twist is enough to slap on a label. But a civilization that only knows how to approach its classics by asking whether they are right-wing or left-wing may have already begun to lose sight of them and, consequently, to lose its points of reference.

Nolan has thrust our contemporary consciousness into one of the oldest stories in the West. And in doing so, he has laid bare the spiritual distance that separates us from Homer.

We can discuss whether that reinterpretation enriches the Odyssey or distorts it; whether it contains woke guilt , Christian conscience, post-war trauma, or simply the legitimate perspective of a creator of our time.

But one thing is hard to deny: the new ending changes the meaning.

Homer’s Odysseus returns to reclaim his place in the world he longed for, and he does.

Nolan’s character discovers that, after returning, he can no longer occupy the same space. His sense of displacement is complete.

Between them lies almost three thousand years of Western spiritual history. Perhaps that’s what Nolan is really hiding inside his horse. Not soldiers.

It leads us to us.